Chapter 5
Chapter Five
D uke pulled up while I paced with a book clutched tight in my hands.
I had an idea about how to present this, but I needed the book to help.
Maybe I didn’t. Maybe if I just asked, he would say yes, but it felt like…
the blanket from my childhood I just couldn’t seem to throw out, no matter how torn and ragged it became.
I needed the comfort of words on a page to help me with this.
“I found a note this morning.” Duke stilled when I said this, his hand hovering over his opposite forearm where he had been rolling up his sleeves. I couldn’t look away from that to meet his eyes. I traced the black lines that were exposed and hoped he understood.
He came in and found his place on my couch like he had countless times before, his feet up on the coffee table in the narrow space left by my books and teacups, his suit coat hanging neatly on that hook by the door that I put up just for him.
I’d followed the tattoos where they hid behind his shirt up to his throat as it bobbed, his jaw moving slightly before he unfroze.
Thankfully, he didn’t look directly at me.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. The thing is…” I still didn’t know how to finish that, what exactly to say. I looked down at my book. “You know how bad I can be with people.”
I thrust the book toward him, as if that proved anything.
He took it, but didn’t look at it. He looked at me, holding my gaze in a way that made me feel stripped down and laid bare.
“Lily, you’re amazing. I wish—” I held up my hand to stop him, a little surprised that it worked. It usually didn’t when we had this particular conversation. It was different now, though, and I didn’t need nice words.
“I know I can be charming and sweet and whatever else. At least, for a little bit.”
“I didn’t mean that. I meant just you. Always.”
I flushed at the compliment but continued on anyway.
“Eventually, though, that sweet, charming me falls away and what’s left is… well, what’s left is someone that most are” —I swallowed hard and forced the words out that I didn’t even like to think— “repulsed by.”
Duke growled. Growled . Oh my god.
“Idiots. Not you. Them. Any of them. All of them. Idiots. You aren’t repulsive, Lily. You’re…” He didn’t finish. He just stood and paced, the book still clutched in his hands.
“I know. Amazing… and yet, I can’t seem to make anything work and I’ve never even been kissed before.”
He flinched at that.
“What?” I asked, confused by his reaction .
“You don’t remember last night, do you?” He stopped pacing, his back to me, like he had something to be ashamed of.
“No, I don’t, though I gather from the note I wanted to be kissed and you, being you, wouldn’t kiss me.” Venom and hurt coated in my voice when I said this. I didn’t mean for it to be there, but I didn’t seem to have control of that.
He didn’t respond, his breathing loud in the quiet room, and I thought the worst. Something bad happened last night.
“You kissed me.”
I reared back. I kissed him? I searched my memories, desperate for what, apparently, was my first kiss. I met a wall of black lightly interspersed with cherry flavored flashes of him, but nothing specific enough to grasp.
I sank into my chair. This explained his reticence. We’d already kissed, and he never wanted to do it again.
“Oh,” I whispered.
“I’m sorry.” He turned to me and saw something that made him kneel before me, like the hero of a book.
Except, no. This was reality, not a book. It didn’t get to be good.
“Why are you apologizing to me? I’m the one that drunkenly kissed you.” My hands twitched with wanting to reach out to him and soothe away the wrinkle between his eyes.
“It was your first kiss, and you can’t even remember it.” He put down the book and picked up my hands, his thumb tracing my knuckles, and I had to squash an image of him bringing them to his lips for a kiss, like a knight.
“So, kiss me again when I can remember.” I don’t know where the courage for those words came from, but there they were, hanging between us, waiting for him to grab them, to kiss me.
“Lily,” he warned, low and rough, and a little thrill ran through me.
“Please. Just one kiss and if it’s bad, then we can forget about it.”
“And if it isn’t?” His eyes were dark and intense on me, the hazel color being swallowed by his pupils. Oh . That’s what that looked like. No wonder the women in my books fell for it every time.
“Then…” I licked my lips, and Duke followed the path of my tongue. I couldn’t finish my sentence—to say it out loud.
Time seemed frozen as we stared at each other, the space between us becoming heavy with each labored breath until it felt like it would explode.
And then it did. Except it wasn’t what I wanted, what I needed.
Duke pushed away from me, the book forgotten on the floor, the only proof he ever stood in front of me in the first place.
“I can’t lose your friendship, Lily. I don’t… I can’t lose you.” He pulled the long strands of his dirty blonde hair as if that could change this.
“You won’t. Never.” I promised, though I knew I couldn’t, not when he had a say in it, too.
“I don’t know how to navigate this, Lily. What if… what if it’s good, but then I fuck up.” He closed his eyes and dropped his hands. “I can’t have you hating me.”
“I could never hate you. I’d probably hate myself, but not you.”
“That would be worse.”
“How? I already hate myself quite regularly. It’s bearable as long as I find another book to love.” He looked around at the piles of books around us as if he really saw them for the first time. Maybe he did.
“Are you really asking me to do this?” It wasn’t ‘no.’ It might even be ‘yes.’
“Yes. You can say no, but…” I twirled my hands, overwhelmed at the thought of what I wanted. “Just one kiss. If it’s bad, we forget it happened. If it’s not bad, you can still say no to anything…more. I won’t be hurt,” I lied, and Duke scoffed as if he knew it immediately.
I didn’t promise him we could forget about a good kiss. I couldn’t do that. If it was good, I would likely remember it for the rest of my life, but I had to bear that burden and I would willingly do it just for the chance.
A chance that may never come again.
“I’m not exactly good at relationships, Lily,” he said as he paced, still occasionally tugging at his hair as if that could give him the answer to this.
“Oh! I almost forgot that part. If we… do more, we could set a limit. Just friends, plus s— sex for a month.”
“Why a month?” He finally stopped pacing and turned to me.
“It’s arbitrary, mostly, but I thought that would be enough time to try some things.”
“What things?”
I gestured to the book he dropped.
“Things from your books?” He bent down and picked it up. I had a page bookmarked, and he raised his eyebrow as he read it. “Kinky things from your books.”
“You don’t have to do any of it, but… this may be the only chance I have in my life and if it’s all I’m going to get…” I pulled my legs up under me, curling myself into as small a space as possible at the thought that I may never have an opportunity like this again .
“You want to try everything,” he finished for me like he knew as soon as I started talking exactly what I was going to say.
I shrugged.
He paced again, turning every seventh step, shaking his head occasionally, and finally slumped into his seat on my couch.
He looked at my ceiling.
“God help me. Ok” —I nearly jumped from excitement— “but I reserve the right to stop if it turns out kissing you is like kissing my sister.”
“You don’t have a sister.” He just stared at me silently, waiting for my answer. “Fine. Deal.”
I waited for him to move, but he just sat there, his legs spread wide, taking up most of the couch, and studied me for a minute.
“Come here,” he finally said.
“What?”
“If I’m going to kiss you, I’m going to do it right.
Now. Come. Here.” He patted one of his legs and I just stared at it.
Sitting on his lap seemed… intimate, almost too close.
Which is absurd, because I asked for this, begged for kisses and sex and everything from him.
I’d even bookmarked a page in a book, but sitting on his lap, now, here, it was almost too much. Almost.
I swallowed hard and walked over to him.
“Um, like straddling you or across your lap or—I’ve never sat on a lap before.” I tucked some hair that had come out of my loose pony behind my ear and waited for instructions. Embarrassment flooded me at being thirty and so unsure of what to do.
“You choose.” His arms were across the back of the couch, and he sat unmoving while I thought. He looked powerful, dangerous, and sexy. I couldn’t look away.
I sat across his lap, as close to his knee as I could. He brought his hands down, one to my hip, and the other slid up my back to tangle in my hair. It felt so much like I imagined in the shower earlier that the breath stuttered out of me.
He angled me toward him until my breasts brushed against him and I had no choice but to put my hands on his chest to balance against him.
Duke used his grip on my head to tilt it, so I looked at him. I’d been so focused on where my chest brushed his that I forgot why I even sat on his lap in the first place.
He brought his hand around and brushed his thumb along my bottom lip, the rough callouses from his regular sparing pulling at it until my mouth opened slightly.
He focused on my mouth, like he was studying and memorizing it.
His familiar face had been etched permanently into my mind from a lifetime of friendship, but I’d never noticed the little flecks of gold in his hazel eyes or the way his nose was not quite straight.
He must have broken it at some point, but he never said when.
There was still so much I didn’t know about him.
Slowly, so slowly that I almost didn’t notice at first, he leaned toward me, eyes still on my mouth. All I could do was stare as his lips met mine, brief at first, just a brush, and then another.
Excited flutters raced across my skin from the feel of him, warm and soft. His thumb, which had been tracing my bottom lip, moved to my chin, and he used his grip there to angle my head and deepen the kiss. He pulled me in closer while he traced my jaw to tangle in my hair.
His grip stung, just a little, but he slipped his tongue out and lightly traced my bottom lip and I forgot all about the sting. I forgot everything but the feel of his tongue tracing my lips.
He gently scraped his teeth along my bottom lip, pulling it into his mouth to nibble on it.
I gasped, and he used the opening to dip his tongue in to brush along mine and coax it into joining him in a delicate dance. I didn’t hesitate or think. I followed his lead.
I traced his broad shoulders before wrapping my arms around his neck, needing to be closer to him, to melt into him and meld our bodies into one.
He used his grip on my hair to pull my head back, just far enough to break our kiss.
Our chest rose and fell together in a rough, primal rhythm. His forehead came down to rest on mine, like he didn’t have the strength left to even hold his head up.
His pupils swallowed the hazel in his green eyes. He looked at me like he’d never seen me before.
“I have one condition,” he said in a raspy, low voice that I’d never heard from him.
“Ok.” My voice was a whisper, like he’d stolen it through our kiss, and I only had remnants left to use.
“When this month is over,” he swallowed, “when this month is over, you don’t hate me.”
“Never.”
I don’t know how long we sat there, but his hands were so warm that they felt like a brand on me, marking me so everyone could see.
“So we are clear,” I said eventually. “That was not like kissing a sister.”
Duke laughed. “Darlin’, if that’s what kissing your sister is like, it’s amazing more people aren’t breaking that particular law.”
I laughed, but I needed more. I needed to hear it .
“I need you to be more clear. You accept? We will… copulate?” I retreated to more formal language to hide how overwhelmed I felt at the intensity of our kiss. I needed to hear it. Explicitly.
“No, Lily, we won’t copulate.” My shoulders slumped. I guess I misunderstood, but I still sat in his lap with his hands gripping me like he couldn’t let go. “We will fuck. I will take you in every way your little heart desires, and probably in many ways you didn’t even know existed.”
“Oh.” I pulled back. His eyes were so intense and focused entirely on me. It made me squirm in his lap. His grip tightened, holding me still. His head fell to the back of the couch as he breathed deep, keeping me anchored to him in his punishing hands.
“One month. I will give you one month, and at the end of it we go back to being friends,” he said when he looked back up. He brought his thumb back to my bottom lip and traced it again, watching the movement like he was in awe of it.
“One month. Just friends.”